La imagen del emigrante en estudiantes de Turin. Estudio exploratorio en un contexto educativo

The aim of the present research was to study the social representation that our undergraduate respondents have about immigrants. We explored the relationship between this representation and the following variables: a) racial prejudice; b) political ideology; c) quality of relation our respondents have with immigrant peers; d) attendend school; e) parents’ educational level. The theoretical background referred both to cognitive-motivational perspective on modern racism and to the social representations theory (Moscovici, 1984). 344 undergraduates (47% males; 53% women; age average: 19.5) from an Italian north-west town were interviewed. All participants had almost one immigrant classmate. A questionnaire was created, containing traditional measures of racial prejudice (Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995), political orientation, and the other variables considered; a free association task pointed out the words people used to describe immigrants. Quantitative data were submitted to MANOVA, while the lexicon production was analysed with Alceste software. Findings concerning racial attitudes and ideology were coherent with the literature, as expected; the analysis of textual corpus highlighted the relations between the considered variables and the social representations our subjects offered. In particular we noted the influence of the quality of relations both on racial prejudice and social representations.